How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Content warnings: disordered eating, racism, colorism, misogyny (run-of-the-mill sexism, purity shaming, inappropriate sexualization of minors/daughters), inappropriate sexual conduct involving a minor, sex work possibly involving minors, derogatory language towards Latinx and gay people, Asian stereotyping

I'm pretty conflicted about this book; however, I'm NOT Own Voices and that should be to be taken into consideration.

I loved that this book starts in a decade and goes back into time, showing us what life under Trujillo looked like and what led the García family to make decisions they did. I wanted more details from Mami and Papi's perspectives; while Papi frustrated the hell out of me, there were elements of his life that echoed what I loved about Pa's storyline in HOW MUCH OF THESE HILLS IS GOLD.

On the flip side, there's a lot of problematic stuff in here about colorism and origin. The sisters talk constantly about beauty as it relates to a Swedish ancestor and they'll reference their Spanish origins. There are sentences that insinuate what an uncultured place the DR was before the Spanish colonizers came, along with repeated colorist references to the Dominican “café con leche” complexion compared to Haitian “blue-black” or “black-black.” It's made clear that being white-passing Dominican is better than being “café con leche.” (All of the colorist references in quotation marks are direct quotes.)

I also think this was a hard book to read following THE UNDOCUMENTED AMERICANS. This novel portray a fairly sanitized immigration story – not without problems or worries, but also not one focused on imminent danger and threat. And while immigration stories don't all need to be about pain and trauma, I didn't think this book contextualized relative privilege well.

In terms of writing, I didn't think the voices of the four sisters were differentiated well enough, but I can't decide if that's purposeful or not.

Books are a certainly a product of time and place, and this book was written almost 30 years ago – much of how we critique and analyze books has changed. And yet while much has changed, I see facets of this book – colorism, in particular – still crop up often, unchecked.

I fell in love with this book.
Julia Alvarez wrote in 1990 what we are writing now.
I loved every single page of it.

I think this would probably be a three star book if I weren't living in the Dominican Republic... a lot of my enjoyment was derived from simple recognition. STILL THOUGH it was pretty good.